Life's Fare

by Greg Yevko

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Stanley,” she would exclaim in exasperation. “You know we haven’t got the money for horses,” and that would inevitably lead to another argument. Stanley started to feel a little helplessness creep into his life, even with his lucky bottle-top.

  If he thought that his mother’s tears at the railway station were bad, when Marlene said goodbye to her only son whilst Alvita’s husband loaded Robert’s belongings into the car to go to Heathrow Airport, her display of uncontrolled emotion was only marginally short of ridiculous as far as Robert was concerned.

  “Mum, I’m only going for a bloody year, not for good.”

  Mrs Marley remained inconsolable. “Yes, but South Africa,” she sobbed “I’ve seen the film Zulu five times; I know what those people are like.” And there was no amount of reason or logic that anyone could convey to her that would convince her that she would never see her beloved son again.

  “Look, I’ll write as soon as I get there,” he had tried to soothe her, but to little effect.

  “I’ve put chocolate bars and a jar of Marmite in your bag,” she had managed to get out in between the sobbing, “as I’m sure those won’t be available out there; at least it will remind you of us back home.” And with that she once again collapsed into a wailing mess, burying her head in Stanley’s neck, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably.

  Robert could barely wait to get into his brother-in-law’s car.

  The flight to Johannesburg was a lot longer than it would have been had Robert not been travelling South African Airways; due to various anti-apartheid measures taken by several African countries to limit the available air-space over their domains, the plane had to follow the coast line around the bulge of Africa; luckily, even in economy class, there was enough free alcohol on board to help the long hours pass pleasantly enough.

  Robert’s vision of South Africa turned out to be reasonably accurate as far as beer, barbecues, rugby and sunshine went. He had managed to find himself a very small residential hotel to live in with a group of young folks of similar status in life as himself, and most evenings were spent in and out of each other’s rooms sharing beers, or sharing stories, or just sharing time. It reminded Robert of being in Halls of Residence but without the hassle of having to study; unfortunately, you still had to get to work. One of the plus sides of the oil embargoes on South Africa though was that petrol supplies had been limited for a number of years so that people had been encouraged to be thrifty and share lifts to work as much as possible. This resulted in people making arrangements to start and leave work at the same time, including those in management positions at work, hence there was no possibility of hanging back to impress the boss, since the boss left at 4:30 the same as everyone else, albeit everyone in the office had to be there for 7:30. Robert was impressed with this simple concept and vowed to try and take the idea back with him when he eventually got out in the real world of work back home; he would be a trend-setter for sure, or so he envisaged himself to be.

  There was one particular waiter in the restaurant of the hotel who, unlike all the other waiters there, always wore a pair of white gloves, and this especially intrigued Robert.

  “Okay, Mariana,” he one day addressed the longest standing resident of the hotel from their little group as they sat down for their evening meal; that evening it was celery soup followed by lamb chops, finished off with stewed apples and watery custard. She was an attractive 24-year-old blonde who had checked in at the hotel with a view to staying just long enough to look around for a suitable flat – that had been 2 years ago. “How come Charlie wears white gloves, but nobody else does?”

  Mariana pulled her glasses a little further down her slightly pointed nose so she could peer over the top of them to look at Robert closely.

  “You really don’t want to know,” she said with a small shake of her head.

  “Aw, you can’t say something like that and not expect me to follow that one up,” retorted Robert, tucking in noisily to his celery soup, one of his favourites.

  “Well, if you insist?” Mariana had made the statement end with a slight raise on the last word, leaving Robert the option of taking it as a question if he wished to.

  “Of course,” said Robert in a slightly agitated tone. “It’s been bugging me since I’ve been here.”

  “Fair enough,” she responded with a slight sigh. “So, one day, on an evening not to dissimilar to this one,” – as far as Robert was concerned all of the evenings seemed to be pretty much the same; dark at 7 o’clock, 18-20 degrees C. She was obviously enjoying her story-telling role.

  “And people were sat around their tables enjoying their evening meal, when suddenly there was a terrible scream, more of a gasping, throttling sound, like this…,” and she proceeded to clasp her own throat and make noises like someone gagging in the most unpleasant of ways.

  “Yeah, yeah, very theatrical,” said Robert with some mock applause “So I’ll give you an Oscar, now get on with it.”

  Mariana continued to hold her throat, then leaning in closely to Robert’s face, her eyes wide, she whispered, “…. and Pretorius coughed, and spluttered, and thought he was going to choke, he couldn’t breathe, he started to turn blue, then all of a sudden, he was able to cough up a large flake of something that had lodged in his throat. After it shot across the table, Pretorius recovered his breathing and he went around to see what it was.”

  Robert looked at Mariana expectantly; she widened her eyes further in pretend horror, then burst out laughing. “It was only a fucking great scab, about half an inch long. Turns out it had come off Charlie’s right hand where he had been scratching at his psoriasis. Apparently, it had fallen off into the soup at some point between the kitchen and table where Charlie was serving up, and had gone undetected by anyone until Pretorius had got pretty much to the end of the bowl. Hadn’t you noticed that I never eat the soup here anymore?”

  Robert attempted a half-hearted laugh, but suddenly felt just a little queasy with a few spoonfuls of celery soup left to go.

  “Ever since that little episode, the boss has insisted that Charlie keeps his gloves on all the time he’s working in the restaurant, but between you and me, no one can be 100% sure what goes on behind the kitchen doors, so if I can’t see what’s at the bottom of my plate when it arrives, I don’t have it” and with that she took another mouthful of her Castle Lager and laughed quietly to herself – Robert decided that he wasn’t so hungry that he needed to finish the entire bowl of soup after all.

  The must-have car for the young up-and-coming, go-getting, red-blooded white male trying to impress the local bikini-clad talent down on the Durban beach front was none other than the latest Ford to hit the market, the Escort 1300 sport; Robert had only been able to afford a nine-year-old, slug-like Volkswagen Variant on his arrival into South Africa. However, one of their friendship group at the hotel, Don the Speed Merchant, was indeed the proud owner of a shiny, new, bright red model and thus he was often called on as designated driver for any beach front excursions, which he was always happy to do as it gave him the edge on opening lines to somewhat off-set the fact he was only five feet six inches tall. In a country where the white male population had been brought up almost exclusively on unnecessarily over-sized steaks as part of their staple diet, the average build for the typical South African adult rugby player was around six feet tall, irrespective of being a back or a forward, and to weigh between 80 and 110 kilograms, usually, but not always, depending on whether you played within the scrum or outside it. As evidenced by his nick name, Don had managed to secure a place on the wing at a good level at his local club, primarily due to his ability to cover 100 metres in a fraction under eleven seconds, but second to that was his ferocity and aggression once on the pitch – most of which his therapist put down to the fact that he was only five feet six.

  “Ach, Robert,” he had said one evening as they were settling down ahead of the regular Sunday night movie showing at the hotel. Superman The Mo
vie had been released the previous year and had at last become available to hire on film reels from the local rental store, so Brett was busy carefully winding the first few turns of the 8mm film onto the empty receiving reel of the projector set up in the middle of the dining hall.

  “Ach, man, you should come down with me one evening for a training session at the club.”

  Robert had already made a point of letting folks know that he was keen to try and join a rugby club as soon as he had got settled into the hotel, so he needed no second invite.

  “You’re on,” he quickly replied, “What night are we talking about?” and so on Tuesday evening later that week, it came about that Don the Speed Merchant introduced Robert the Comparatively Weedy Industrial Placement Student to his local club; Robert wasn’t too sure that he particularly liked the nick-name they gave him after Don’s introduction, but at least he felt that he was now one of the club, so he reluctantly accepted the tag, CWIPS.

  After a few months hard training, a lot of which was done in the gym, CWIPS started to look and play with much less of the “CW,” and Robert found himself as regular choice Hooker for the second team.

  Not bad, considering they run five teams here, he had written to Maria on one occasion. Also, he had said on the tracing-paper thin blue air mail pad that he used for his overseas letters, there’s a funny story behind how one of the props got his nick-name, Brutus. His real name is Gareth, a huge lump of a bloke, and apparently at one Christmas Do at the club, after finishing his big plate of turkey, stuffing, sausages in bacon, roast potatoes, veg and all the trimmings as they say, he claimed he was still so hungry that he could eat all that again. So of course, someone ordered him another plateful and challenged him to finish it. Not one to duck out, Gareth started to wade his way through it, and much to everyone’s amazement, he did indeed completely clear the plate. “Bloody hell, they’re massive dinners, and he’s not just eaten one, he’s eaten two!” the scrum half had cried, then some literary wag who had done the classics at school called out in his correctly pronounced Latin, “Aha, et tu, Brute!” and from then on, Gareth became known to everyone as Brutus.

  After Maria had read the letter, she had shaken her head in despair. Hmmm, she had thought to herself, maybe this won’t work out once he comes back after all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Golland 5.1 Freezeday

  “Is this really helping, tavarisch?” Perun’s question was aimed as much to himself as it was to Bondje.

  “I’m not really sure myself,” Bondje responded, with a slight involuntary shake of what might have been his head. “I originally thought that a little period in Buganda’s area would sort the helpless two-leg out for sure. Looks like he’s just tried to negate most of what we throw at him by drinking that strange stuff that seems to make them think they’re invincible and getting on with what they call life; maybe we should try a bit of that stuff ourselves to check it out?”

  “Couple of problems with that, tavarisch. 1) We don’t have any mouths to drink it with nor stomachs to take it into, and 2) We’re invincible anyway so how could we tell if it made us feel invincible?”

  Bondje considered Perun’s supposition and realised that he had made a fair point.

  “Okay, smart-arse,” he snapped.

  Again, Perun shook an imaginary head whilst rolling imaginary eyes when he heard the reference to an anatomic part of a body that just didn’t apply to gods like him.

  “Maybe we need to up the ante,” said Perun after a moment’s silence. This was not a phrase that Bondje was fully familiar with, so he decided to query it to make sure Perun wasn’t taking advantage of him.

  “And what exactly do we have to put up the Aunty?” he asked slowly in a somewhat confused voice.

  “Tavarisch, tavarisch…,” The exasperation in Perun’s voice was now clearly palpable, had Bondje been able to palp.

  “It means we have to dig a little deeper, increase some of the risks, exacerbate the situation to increase demands on the two-legs.”

  Bondje did the equivalent of nodding vigorously to show his concurrence.

  “Yes, yes, that sounds like a good plan,” he agreed. “Maybe we need to put another two-leg in his path on a long-term basis and see how that goes. Often, I’ve noticed that when two-legs pair off, whilst there is a lot of fun and jerky things going on initially, after a short while they start to argue a lot and end up almost killing each other; that would be a great test in coping.”

  Perun thought for a moment, then begrudgingly admitted that indeed, it was not a bad idea.

  “Though the trouble is, tavarisch, you know that in spite of all the things we can do, we can’t make creatures actually love each other, that’s down to them. And as you’ve seen already, these two-legs are the trickiest of all the moving things down there to try and influence to stay together for what they laughingly call long periods of time. Any bright ideas how we kick it off?”

  Bondje wracked what might have been his brains. “A little while ago he seemed to get very friendly with that other two-leg at that place by the wet stuff; where did they call it? Woolacombe?”

  Perun considered the notion. “Hmmm, you may be on to something, tavarisch,” he said thoughtfully. “That’s certainly a good a place as any to raise the stakes in our wager. Let’s see how things go from here.”

  With that, and some strange swirling motion that the thunder god had perfected over time, the next phase of the observation was set in motion.

  Umhlabathi 5.1 1:00pm Saturday 24 April 1982 – a pub close to a church

  “Are they here yet?” Stanley was having a swift half with the rest of the front-five from the university scrum that Robert had played hooker in for the previous three years.

  “No problem, I know I can rely on Hopper to get him to the church in time,” he muttered, more to himself than the assembled group. “And, more importantly, I believe we have time for one more swift half!”

  The lads all cheered and another round was gleefully ordered, Stanley’s fourth “swift half” being accompanied by his usual dark rum.

  “Huh,” grunted the wizened Scottish prop (he was noticeably more wizened than the rest, since he had attended university as a mature student, in a very loose sense of the word). “Trouble is, once you’ve had four, you know you’re going to have eight” – another cheer rang round the group.

  The wedding went off without a hitch, though there were one or two knowing winks from the congregation as the 18-year-old bride smiled her way down the aisle.

  “Are-you-pregnant?” mouthed one of the former school friends of the bride, making an exaggerated semi-circle with her hand on the front of her own stomach, just to clarify the silently mouthed question in case it hadn’t been picked up correctly.

  “No-bugger-off,” came back the beautifully-mouthed silent reply.

  It was a great day for Stanley, seeing his only son taking the giant leap of faith into a commitment with his young bride, two young lives being bound into one, to face whatever life would throw their way and to try and battle through it. Good luck with that, he smiled to himself, as he remembered how he and Marlene had struggled in the early days of their own lives together.

  He looked around the 13th century parish church and marvelled as to how different it had been for him when he and Marlene had got married thirty-two years previously. No church and hotel reception for him. He thought back fondly on that day when he had whisked Marlene into the registration office in London, and cursed himself silently for having lost contact with one of his earliest and best friends he had made on coming to England, Rye.

  The evening reception was the highlight of Stanley’s day as he was ultimately crowned winner of the knobbly knees contest; Robert and his bride had decided to cut back on evening entertainment to save money ahead of their impending departure to foreign climes. Stanley’s win had been aided by the allure of having his long-johns tucked into his socks, thereby creating an unforgettable vision of what appeared to be
snow white legs with a soft knobbiness resembling two Twiglets having been dipped in bleach.

  It took three of the front-five who had started the day with Stanley ahead of the church service to parade him shoulder high as part of the winning ceremony. This was more due to his instability rather than being a direct function of his weight. It may have been the pinnacle of Stanley’s evening, but it certainly was not the highlight of the day for Robert and his bride.

  The industrial year placement had gone well for Robert in spite of the odd slip which included one memorable occasion when a process zone had to be evacuated following one of his pressure surveys on the Hot Oil System at the Asphalt plant.

  In fairness to Robert, he had only asked the operator to take a pressure-gauge reading at a sample point which had turned out to be blocked. How was a young industrial-year placement student supposed to know that it was not really good practice to try and free a blocked hot oil sample point by ramming an old welding rod up it and wiggling it around vigorously whilst swearing, “I’ll get this fucking thing clear if it’s the last thing I do.” Indeed, it was one of the last things that the operator did for that oil company as he was summarily fired later in the day after a brief disciplinary meeting with the HR and Operations Managers. The resulting hydrocarbon vapour cloud which had ensued as the hot oil, previously under great pressure, hit the ground as it gushed out, had formed a cloud which then proceeded to drift gently with the wind away from the Asphalt plant. For whatever reasons, on that particular day at that particular time, the wind had been blowing from West to East, which took the cloud and gently dissipated it high into the sky, away from the main body of the refinery and the numerous ignition sources that could potentially ignite it.